Healthcare delivery in underserved areas is a huge challenge the world over. The leveraging of scarce resources of a nation in remote areas is extremely difficult. Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) started in rural community of New Mexico, one of the underdeveloped states of USA in 1994 is built to address this challenge.

Over the coming year, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs will work with several partners (including Village Capital, Emory University, I-DEV and Halloran Philanthropies) to expand on what New Ventures and many others have begun—and ultimately accelerate the accelerators. To do this, we are looking at pipelines, operations, and evaluation.

Today, I’m announcing that the World Resources Institute (WRI) has stepped down as co-managing partner of the NextBillion network. The William Davidson Institute (WDI) will continue to direct the network of sites as sole manager of NextBillion, along with input and involvement from our Content Partners.

I was invited to join a fascinating conversation at SOCAP12 about Gender Lens investing. Criterion Institute, one of the main organizations driving the conversation, describes a “Gender Lens “as a viewfinder that reveals opportunities for the world of investing with a focus on women and girls. The goal of Gender Lens investing is to drive increased investing and return through the implementation of a Gender Lens.

Globally, demand for sustainably-sourced products continues to grow at a staggering pace. Last year alone, consumers spent $6.6 billion on fair trade products. Companies from Mars to Wal-Mart to Unilever are responding to this demand by making pledges to source all, or some portions of, their inputs from more sustainable sources. In order to meet these pledges, companies are changing the very way they do business.

For small and growing businesses that have the potential to create social and environmental change, financing is not easy to come by. Impact investing is on the rise, but the cost of doing risky deals in faraway lands remains prohibitive for investors, especially when deal sizes are small and returns remain minimal. As investors and thought leaders wrestle with these issues, a new potential solution has arisen: crowdfunding.

The IRIS registry is a platform created by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a not-for-profit organization, which since its founding in 2009 has been dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact investing. The Registry functions as a directory that provides transparency into the IRIS metrics regularly in use by various organizations; it also allows users to browse organization profiles by the sector focus, impact goals, and target regions of the listing organization.

What did entrepreneurs think of Rio+20? What are their impressions of how donors, governments, and organizations can and are helping green and inclusive markets flourish? We had a chance to follow up with the entrepreneurs from the four New Ventures India companies that participated in the Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum session, “Enabling green and inclusive markets – a case for public-private collaboration” to ask them these questions.